The policy focus remains on home ownership, but a new survey shows slight improvements in affordability do little to help people on low incomes. Their plight calls for better social housing policy.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, speaks with Toronto Mayor John Tory before a recent news conference announcing funding for affordable housing in the Toronto area.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
Canadians should invest in affordable housing. It’s a commitment to lifting the most vulnerable members of our society from the ground up — and lifting our entire country up in the process.
This shed has been illegally converted into housing. Two prams and three mattresses are visible.
Informal Accommodation and Vulnerable Households, author provided courtesy of Fairfield City Council
With Australian city rents too high for low-income earners, increasing numbers are forced to share houses or rooms or to live in options like ‘beds in sheds’ and other illegal dwellings.
The numbers of buyers able to celebrate moving into their first home are still well down on pre-GFC levels – and low-income renters are faring even worse.
fizkes/Shutterstock
Housing policy is a stark point of difference at this election. While the government took promising steps to set up social housing finance, it has yet to give any sign it will finish what it started.
The recent slump in building approvals is a reminder of the risks of an over-reliance on a boom-and-bust market to meet all housing needs.
Joel Carrett/AAP
Housing markets never have met the lowest-income households’ needs. Now is the time to tackle problems that have been years in the making by creating a better system to supply their housing.
A cake made to farewell the last tenant to leave the Sirius building, which was built in Sydney at a time when governments saw the need to invest directly in public housing.
Ben Rushton/AAP
If we recognised social housing as infrastructure as essential as transport links, schools and hospitals, not properly investing in it could become unthinkable.
Housing affordability becomes less of a concern in the years after buying a house, especially for people who bought a decade or more ago.
Paul Miller/AAP
Affordability is a problem across Sydney for prospective home buyers. But if they are able to become owners, new research shows affordability becomes much less of a problem over five to ten years.
Although tiny houses take many forms, most are situated in rural or semi-rural areas.
Jekka Shearer
Tiny houses aren’t for everyone, but most people who live in them are positive about the experience. Yet planning laws still make this way of life harder and less secure than it could be.
Recent reports suggest Airbnb is having an impact on housing markets in cities popular with tourists.
(Shutterstock)
It’s now clear that a single American company, Airbnb, has upended local housing markets, pushed rental prices skyward and could be contributing to poverty, especially in cities popular with tourists.
Labor leader Bill Shorten has announced a policy based on a solid principle of fairness, but with a second-best model of delivering social housing.
Julian Smith/AAP
Labor has made a substantial commitment to tackling inequality in Australia, but has taken a second-best approach to overcoming the huge shortfall of social housing.
Labor would work with community housing providers, the residential construction sector and institutional investors.
Flickr
In his Sunday announcement, Shorten says the ALP’s ten-year plan to build 250,000 houses and units would be Australia’s “biggest ever investment in affordable housing”.
The current social housing construction rate – barely 3,000 dwellings a year – does not even keep pace with rising need, let alone make inroads into today’s backlog.
Joel Carrett/AAP
A tenfold increase in building is needed to overcome the current social housing shortfall and cover projected growth in need. But it can be done, and direct public investment is the cheapest way.
Australian cities need to sustain higher levels of construction and to provide higher-density developments to ensure growing populations have access to affordable housing.
Brendan Esposito/AAP
Governments should stop offering false hopes and pandering to NIMBY pressures. As well as increased public and private housing supply, growing cities need well-designed higher-density development.
The Melbourne Apartments Project developed by the Barnett Foundation offered 28 units to households living within 4km of the site and willing to leave their social housing.
Barnett Foundation
Shared equity models have a dual benefit of making home ownership affordable for people on modest incomes and freeing up scarce social housing for other households in need.
Vancouver has scaled up delivery of affordable social housing to about 15 times as much as Melbourne over the past three years.
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Cities overseas that have been able to overcome the affordable housing challenges facing cities like Melbourne have adopted a coordinated and systemic approach to scaling up solutions that work.
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Getting more out of ‘lazy’ land, such as this community housing built over a Port Phillip City Council-owned car park, is a key strategy to reduce the shortage of affordable housing.
CIty of Port Phillip
As Melbourne’s population hits 5 million, it’s a reminder that growing cities must make much better use of vacant and underused land to meet the urgent need for affordable housing.
Local councils across Australia are concerned about a shortage of affordable housing, but feel the problem is beyond local government’s capacity to solve.
Dave Hunt/AAP
A national survey shows councils know much of the housing in their local areas isn’t affordable. But providing affordable housing is not a priority because they see it as being beyond their means.
In Canberra you can build on land you don’t own.
Shutterstock
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Professor; School of Economics, Finance and Property, and Director, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Curtin Research Centre, Curtin University